Description
Scholarly work on extremism focuses overwhelmingly on non-state actors: on terrorist organisations, armed groups, and political parties. This is odd, since the most famous instances and catastrophic consequences of extremism in human history tend to be bound up with states – i.e. governments and their subordinate agencies. As Qassim Cassam (2022, p. 2) notes: “To get a sense of the scale of human misery for which extremism has been responsible, one only has to think of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Mao’s China.” This neglect of state extremism applies in International Relations as much as in other research fields. The closest IR scholars get to engaging with state extremism is generally through work on revisionist states, revolutionary states, authoritarian states, or states engaged in active atrocity crimes/human rights abuses. Though all these concepts and the scholarly literatures orientated around them are important, they are not effective substitutes for considering how extremism operates within and among states. At a time of potentially growing extremism amongst states, this is a potentially severe analytical gap. In this paper, I therefore, first, argue for the need to bring a focus on states into the scholarly debate over the nature, drivers and consequences of extremism and then, second, consider how International Relations scholars might theorise about state extremism within the international system.
